1. Field of the Invention
The present inventions generally relates to methods and systems for transmitting binary-coded data to and from integrated circuit (IC) devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
The present invention generally relates to methods and systems for transmitting binary-coded data to and from IC devices and, in particular, between portions of system-on-chip (SoC) devices or between the IC devices and respective peripheral devices.
In the IC devices, the power consumed by system buses, such as data, address, and command buses, may represent a significant portion of the total power used by an IC device. In general, power consumption of a system bus is proportional to an average number of transitions occurring on bit lanes of the bus during transmission of the data. For example, in SoC devices using high-end microprocessors and having 32/64-bit system buses, input/output (I/O) systems may consume up to 70% of the total power.
Recent designs in the field of the low power I/O systems have been mostly focused on increasing transmission capacity of the system busses using a priori knowledge of the data to be transmitted (i.e., during transmission of non-random or partially random data) or on implementation of alternative data coding schemes. However, such approaches often require hardware customization of the respective system buses (for example, increasing the widths of a data or address bus) and may limit compatibility between the ICs and peripheral devices.
As such, despite the considerable effort in the art devoted to development of low power systems for transmitting data, further improvements would be desirable.
To facilitate understanding, identical reference numerals have been used, where possible, to designate identical elements that are common to the figures, except that suffixes may be added, when appropriate, to differentiate such elements. The images in the drawings are simplified for illustrative purposes and are not depicted to scale. It is contemplated that features or steps of one embodiment may be beneficially incorporated in other embodiments without further recitation.
The appended drawings illustrate exemplary embodiments of the invention and, as such, should not be considered as limiting the scope of the invention that may admit to other equally effective embodiments.